


In the Desert

by waspgrenade



Category: OFF (Game)
Genre: Alternate Canon, Bad Batter - Freeform, Cannibalism, Desert, Dialogue, Heart, Identity, Inspired by Poetry, Maybe - Freeform, Mild Gore, Post-Apocalypse, Post-Canon, Stream of Consciousness, Teeth, Tentacles, Vore, chomp chomp yummy cardiovascular tissue, i hate myself for that but here we are, its a ww1 poem okay, look we got us a monster goin all vorey on himself, zacharie is the speaker here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-09
Updated: 2019-09-09
Packaged: 2020-09-29 11:47:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,601
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20435504
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/waspgrenade/pseuds/waspgrenade
Summary: He sees, on one of his many days wandering the wastes (for be he a vagabond if he is not a merchant) what may be his friend and may be his enemy, stripped to the barest planes of paper skin. The thing is crouched, horrid and contorted, on the ground, holding flesh to his maw and pulling at it with his (maybe, just maybe) new stalactite teeth."Amigo, is it good?"And the thing turns to him, with hollow white eyes, and growls.lmao look at me still in the dead fandom





	In the Desert

**Author's Note:**

> Credit to Stephen Crane for the poem and Mortis Ghost for the game  
[In the Desert](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46457/in-the-desert-56d2265793693)
> 
> this is,,, dumb  
also kinda gorey so if you don't like words like 'viscera', and like a dude eatin his heart you might wanna turn around now

He is carrying a bag on his shoulder, and it is heavy, and it is bulging, pressed in irregular shapes against his spine, and it is the same one he has always had.

How fitting he should be carrying his wares with him even now.

He had no reason, no need, to take a name for a purpose, but what else is a name for? It is an identity. For most, it is given, but not for all. Zacharie is his name: he is the Merchant, he is that of Wastes, of Frogs and Smiles, of Credits, Wings, Blades, Blood. Cats have fled from his path oft enough that he cannot quite dub them an epithet (they’re a rare delicacy these days, as most things have become).

There is sand, grit, dust between his toes. It has built and built as he has lived and walked and lived again. It is a playful beast crawling into the cuffs of his clacks, his still immaculate sweater, catching between his teeth, hiding within the folds of his skin and clothes. The sun is a more vengeful animal, and further feral is the moon. Both offer him a tantalizing array of temperatures, spreading a gambling hand of cards reaching from biting heat to boiling cold. He would consider the sand his friend as well if it did not reach for his eyes.

His same eyes (invisible where they lay safe behind black pits and fake smiles) stay trained forward, for there is no point in moving them if one’s surroundings are one total, pure horizon. There is nothing but the sun to guide him, and he sometimes must remind himself not to chase it.

His eyes roll suddenly to the East, and in the middle of sweeping nothing, there is something.

Now, Zacharie considers himself a man of an open mind, what with the rarer qualities of being both a man and a human one, and there are few things that could possibly push him to the precipice of judgment. This thing does not push that line, but it does make him stop. (His calves ache, suddenly, and the pain is a heady feeling.)

In his many days of walking these wastes –to search, perhaps, for a customer, another breath to share his own hollow ones with again- he has not seen much but sprawling and endless desert. It still trembles with heatwaves, the heartbeats of earth, quivering, beckoning, and shuffling him over and towards the dunes, yet it has been barren for as long as he has existed within it. It is unlikely he would see a human here, and he is not seeing one anywhere near his present circumstances. Is he? Maybe, just maybe, he was expecting a human over the thing that is presented to him now. But the knows this thing (not a man, but a creature), and it is undeniable that the thing would not recognize him in turn if it would simply turn its head.

He is the Merchant, here and then and everywhere, and it is the Batter. Father, Creator, the Purifier and Savior.

It is a matter of fact that Zacharie knows and has known the Batter, though the B-side of the fact trills impatiently behind his thoughts; this is not the thing that he had, has, will in some other time come to know. Zacharie shuffles forward on his same unmotivated feet, aching in his own right, and watches the creature write in unto himself. The sand spills under them both.

What makes this beast so different from Zacharie’s Batter (the one he has known- befriended, maybe, one upon another time) is not the massive talons growing cruelly off massive, elongated hands. It is not the soulless eyes that lay, beady, empty in their mangled intelligence, against the flat sides of his disproportionate and swollen head, nor is it the deep red dripping as froth from his mouth, wide calcified teeth, and tongue. What distinguishes this one is his lack of a weapon.

What carried him forward more than his name.

What distinguishes this one is the absence of a confident approach.

What distinguishes this one is his lack of posture, of purpose, of puppeteers.

And the fact that in all the time Zacharie had known him and his quest to purify the worlds, he had never been gifted the chance to see the Batter wounded. Not like this.

Not with his chest torn open by his own distended fingers, cleaved between the ribs with rough, gaping edges. Not adorned with nothing but himself, with crimson-painted paper skin, with contorted limbs, a horrid smile. Not with his heart cradled in his hands- connected to him only with pulsating strings, throbbing with red and wet and dripping with lipids. The Batter leans down (Zacharie thinks only for a moment that he might be weeping) and sinks his teeth into the muscle.

It is bleeding down his jaw, spurts of juice, strips of tissue that are thin and that disappear form what might have once been lips. And he _is_ weeping, the Batter. Black teardrops splatter onto the sand, fizzling in the grey daylight heat. He does not lift his head from himself.

“Amigo, is it good?”

The Batter does not turn to him, choosing the much better option instead to tear out his own aorta. The virgin earth is sullied by drops of putrid tears and monster’s blood. His heart thumps, once, twice. The Batter then nods. Zacharie sits on the crest of the dune, basks in both the desert’s heat and his temporary compatriot’s feast ten feet away. They are silent, and they are waiting.

There is nothing.

And there is nothing.

And there is

nothing.

“It… is bitter,” the Batter supplies him, removing viscera from his bone-white face with a tentacle tongue, and of course it is. Was it supposed to be anything else? He murmurs it out like it pains him, like a confession- conspiratorial, broken, cupping something that might have once been holy. His heart is a stained thing, flecked with holes and strings, filled with blood he has both taken and created, punctured through with pastpastpresentwhatelseisthere, what else is there but a man of two wills, and tainted by influence. He is not a being capable of his own choices, and yet has he not cursed himself? He is as much the Batter as he is the Puppeteer (but there are countless of them, and as such countless of him; all the same character, but with different steps and purchases and lifetimes, living through and through the same moment with every break and flutter of breath and time and blood and thought).

“Bitter,” he repeats. A father, once, a friend and trusted ally, a lover, an idol, a customer. A horrible thing, to live. The Batter lives with life embedded into himself, with innocents caked on his palms.

Zacharie smiles behind the mask that he wears like he used to his crown. He is not the only one who lost, and it is evident.

“And yet you continue to gorge yourself, friend.”

He does. Another chunk of flesh enters the gaping maw. Zacharie watches the organs inside the creature’s hollow chest pulse despite its depravity, watches the Batter’s head finally swivel and lift despite its gargantuan weight.

“But I like it,” the Batter tell him softly, a mournful whispered growl, “_because_ it is bitter.”

“Well, you were always a savory sort. I am not surprised quite to see you like this, amigo, though you might like it better if I was. We both seem to be fallen in the pit.” The Batter cocks his head like an animal. (A cat, the Cat, his friend and partner in the death of a partner.) “I am still here,” Zacharie clarifies, “searching for credits and things I might sell. Not like it matters. There is no need for repentance when the gods of this world are dead. Not that you made that choice, friend.”

He swings his mighty head side to side, still dripping oil form his eyes. Zacharie sighs and folds his fists under his chin. He hums a nursery song, the notes resonant and aching within his hoarse throat. The bile in his mouth is almost as sweet as his once friends, and he ponders the taste of his own heart. The Batter mouths the ‘_dormez vous’ _as Zacharie thinks it. Would it be chewy? Would his throat fill with iron? Would he choke on it? Could the blood of it be his beverage? Would he stain his sweater? Would he be able to swallow the weight of his sins, his regret? To consume himself, to be whole. Would he be able to keep it down?

Would he find it in himself to bite?

“Say, Batter, did you want them to die? Did you know what They were doing?”

“I like it because it is bitter, and because it is _my_ heart.”

The tune of Zacharie’s melody falls flat.

He stands.

He readjusts the bag on his shoulders, knowing that the insistent prod between his spine is the last bat of the Batter (she has a name, but it is not here), the last gift Zacharie could possibly give; if it comes to that, though, he would find himself the instigator of something bloody surely desecrating Her Royal wasteland. He stares a second longer at the only living thing he will find again, and knows he was never going to give it the satisfaction.

Zacharie’s return to everlasting nothing is a bit bittersweet.

He thinks he might know how the Batter felt.


End file.
